Fur Trappers in Northwest Are Caught in a Soft Market : Overproduction and animal rights campaigns have taken a toll on the industry.

They are not on any endangered species list, but fur trappers are a declining breed.

In the profitable 1980-81 season, Idaho licensed a record 3,119 trappers. Bobcat pelts were going for $230 each and beaver for $18 apiece. Last year, only 636 licensed trappers were in the field, with bobcat pelts averaging only $75 and beaver down to $8.

While anti-fur campaigns from animal rights activists are cited as one cause for the lesser demand for pelts, trappers and fur wholesalers in the Northwest say the struggling industry was hardest hit by overproduction.

“It’s like milk or any other commodity affected by supply-and-demand,” said Dave Hawkes, a fur trapper who also helps run his family’s 37-year-old mink farm near Franklin, Ida. “We got a glut in the late 1980s.”

Gary Schroeder, one of Idaho’s biggest buyers of raw pelts, said: “The ranch industry has decimated the fur trade; they’ve overproduced.”

Now entering a new trapping season, and far from the animal rights groups in Washington, D.C., the bankruptcies of furriers in New York and the refusal by some fashion models in Los Angeles to take on fur commercials, fur trappers and buyers say they see signs that the fur business is on the rebound.

Historically, the role of fur trappers has been one of rugged individualism, pioneers tracking the uncharted rivers and treacherous mountain passes on the frontier. But in the mid-1980s, the fur business took on a different image in the eyes of animal rights advocates and their sympathizers.

Dan Mathews, who heads the anti-fur campaign for the 350,000-member People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, says that fur farms, through dirty, cramped conditions, and trappers, through neglected traps that cause captured animals to starve or freeze to death, are insensitive to beavers, coyotes and other fur-bearing animals.

Once PETA and other groups got the word out, “most Americans realized there are many more status symbols that don’t require pain,” Mathews said.

As the animal rights movement gained support, it has claimed an impact beyond the marketplace. Furs have disappeared as game-show prizes and from the wardrobes of the rich and famous.

Paul Fisher, owner of It, a Los Angeles modeling agency with 500 commercial clients and 250 models whose daily rates are as high as $15,000, says his firm joined the cause four years ago. “We haven’t been doing any fur ads or fur catalogues or calendars or anything,” Fisher said.

And legislation is now pending in Congress to outlaw steel-jaw traps and pelts captured in them, said Kathy Liss of the Animal Welfare Institute.

While animal rights leaders like Mathews predict that the fur industry’s slide will continue until it becomes extinct by the end of the decade, trappers and others say that more furs were sold last year, though for less money, and the backlog of pelts in storage is easing.

Tom Parce, 37, president of the Idaho Trappers Assn., disputes PETA’s boasts of crippling the industry and says allegations of neglected traps are equally repugnant to most trappers. “If any trapper lets an animal die from starvation in his trap, the trapper should be hammered,” he said.

Hawkes, 35, said it behooves fur farmers to keep their animals clean and healthy to reap the fullest, finest pelts. “Our mink are as healthy as most pets in this country,” he said.

Parce’s 300-member group also supports a proposal to require trappers to take a course similar to mandatory hunting safety courses and endorses research at the University of Wyoming and Washington State University to develop more humane traps.

Both say that trappers perform a crucial service to farmers and other rural residents whose land is flooded when beavers become overabundant.

Gary Will, a wildlife research manager for Idaho’s Fish and Game Department, says scores of flooding complaints received by his agency are turned over to individual trappers. “We feel trapping is a very important wildlife management tool,” he said.

Parce, asked if he planned to do less trapping along his 150-mile line in northern Idaho, said: “I don’t, and the people I trap for, the farmers and the landowners, hope I don’t.”